Your Opinions on Mixing Techniques - Compression

[mojobone]

Well, it's totally dependent on who's singing and how it was recorded. If I have good singers in a room, tracking together and able to hear themselves and each other well, I likely won't need to compress at all, unless it's for effect; I do like to squish backing vocals to degrade and soften them, push them back in the mix. Usually, I'll set up a bus with two compressors in series, the first one's FET with a fast attack, high threshold and ratio to shave off the transients and the second is an opto compressor, set to a lower threshold and slower attack for smoothing or to bring out some grain. I'll resort to level automation if the singers were recorded in separate sessions. If I want thickening, sometimes it's better to use a doubler or Waves ADT instead of compressing. Tape sims are also cool, for this; the good ones sound really organic.